Superselective pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling

A new technique for the imaging of flow territories of individual extra- and intracranial arteries is presented. The method is based on balanced pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling but employs additional time-varying gradients in between the radiofrequency pulses of the long labeling train. The direction of the additional gradient vector is perpendicular to the selected artery and its azimuthal angle is switched after every radiofrequency pulse. The phases of the radiofrequency pulses are adopted to cancel out the phase accrual of the spins at the center of the target vessel due to the extra applied gradients. This results in efficient inversion at the targeted position, whereas elsewhere time-varying phase changes will result in marginal inversion efficiency. By changing the moment of the added gradients, the size of the labeling focus can be adjusted. Influence of the temporal order of the additional gradients on the labeling efficiency and on the selectivity was investigated by simulations and experimental measurements. In a volunteer study, the acquisition of high signal-to-noise ratio flow territory images of small branches of the anterior cerebral artery distal to the circle of Willis was demonstrated. This shows the method's flexibility for dealing with complicated arterial geometries and its ability to super-selectively label small intracranial arteries.